There are several interesting papers on the arXiv today. One of them, arXiv:2507.15949 , involves my former PhD supervisor. It's on the subject of Quantum Entanglement at collider experiments, and relates back to a paper of his from 1992 that I didn't know about (there's a great line in the new paper where the authors complain that their earlier paper was ignored). (Quantum) Entanglement is the…
Jesper Grimstrup kindly sent me an electronic copy of his new book, The Ant Mill . He was also kind enough to give me some feedback on a first version of this review. It has a foreword by Peter Woit, who has commented briefly about the book on his blog ; the author also has a substack . The subtitle is 'How theoretical high-energy physics descended into groupthink, tribalism and mass production of…
In the news this week was the joint announcement by the presidents of the European Commission and France of initiatives about welcoming top researchers from abroad, with the aim being especially to encourage researchers from the USA to cross the Atlantic. I've seen some discussion online about this among people I know and thought I'd add a few comments here, for those outside Europe thinking about…
As a French citizen I should probably disavow the following post and remind myself that I have access to some of the best food in the world. Yet it's impossible to forget the tastes of your childhood. And indeed there are lots of British things that are difficult or very expensive to get hold of in France. Some of them (Marmite, Branston pickle ...) I can import via occasional trips across the…
Just over a week ago the annual meeting of theoretical particle physicists ( RPP 2024 ) was held at Jussieu, the campus of Sorbonne University where I work. I wrote about the 2020 edition (held just outside Paris) here ; in keeping with tradition, this year's version also contained similar political sessions with the heads of the CNRS' relevant physics institutes and members of CNRS committees,…
The latest (twitter) storm in a teacup on this subject nearly prompted me to return to my soapbox, but now my favoured news source (not the Onion but the Grauniad) has an arcicle attacking particle theorists. Yet again, the usual suspect with books to sell and a career to save is dunking on particle physics, the supposedly finished branch of science that should give up and go home now that we…
For three successive Januaries now, since I started this blog in 2018, I posted a list of the things to look forward to, which for whatever reason didn't materialise and so were essentially repeated the next year. Given the state of the world right now some positive thinking seems to be needed more than ever, but it would be a bit of a joke to repeat the same mistake again. In particular, the…
Like everyone else in the field I've been enjoying the new benefits and disadvantages of Zoom meetings since the lockdown in March. They've given access to talks from all around the world, and made it even easier to carry on working on my own stuff while ignoring someone else talking in the background (it's amazing how motivating being in a talk can be). However, as part of the Fête de la Science,…
Muon g-2: lattice salad A couple of weeks ago, a new lattice QCD calculation by a group known as BMW tried to tip the BSM community into depression by reporting that they could resolve the tension between theory and experiment. Their new result had a tiny uncertainty (of 0.6%), much smaller than any previous lattice computation. As I've mentioned here several times, the anomalous magnetic moment…
When I set up this blog I imagined that I would post things about my Brexit experiences in the build up to it actually happening. In the end it seemed like everything that could be said about it was written elsewhere, and in terms of consequences for me personally there was so much uncertainty about what would actually happen that it was not worth it. In the aftermath of Brexit day I received an…
Yesterday I finished the teaching in my SUSY course for this academic year. I talked (among many other things) about going beyond the MSSM (the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model) and modern perspectives on the future of SUSY phenomenology. To add a little from the post a couple of weeks ago, I presented three approaches that have been embraced by the community for a few years now: Carry on…
The KOTO anomaly Patrick Meade pointed out some new papers about an experimental anomaly, starting with his own . The KOTO experiment at J-PARC in Japan (where they are also building a \( g-2 \) experiment) has seen 3 events when looking for the rare process \( K_L \rightarrow \pi_0 + \mathrm{invisible} \), when they expect a background of \( 0.05 \pm 0.02 \) Update: it was pointed out to me that…
How to make progress in High Energy Physics Before I start, just following from my previous post about B-mesons, today I saw a CERN press release about lepton universality in B-baryons (i.e. particles made of three quarks, at least one of which is a bottom, rather than B-mesons, which have two quarks, at least one of which is a bottom). It seems there is a \( 1 \sigma \) deviation in $$…
Let's try this again It's been suggested that if you go to send someone a "Happy New Year" message and notice that the last one you sent was the same thing last year, that maybe you don't need to send the message. Well, I'm going to try to prove that wrong and once again kick start this blog. My writing in 2018 was hamstrung partly by illness. I had much better excuses last year, which was…
I wasn't able to keep updating this blog last year just after things started to get going. I'll try to be be more active in 2019, which promises to be interesting for a number of reasons, including: Br***t is about to hit the fan. While I am a little insulated from the UK propaganda storm that is the news at the moment, the next three months will be rather tense for me and my family as we find out…
MathJax example So I had a chance on the train home yesterday to digest the muon anomalous magnetic moment papers, and it is an amusing story that I have to share. In short, it is an example of a lie goes halfway round the world while the truth is putting on its shoes. Well, it only took the truth a day or so to get its shoes on, let's see how much damage the lie did. Firstly, I'll give a short…
Another week, another workshop . Today I'm at CERN for a short workshop that I've helped organise about the future of the Intensity Frontier. There are supposed to be three frontiers to search for fundamental physics: energy (i.e. LHC, for now), space (many many telescopes, satellites, balloons, etc) and intensity, which means low energies but large numbers of particles colliding in the lab. The…
Today until the end of the week we're hosting the KUTS 8 workshop here in Paris. It's a small workshop gathering about 20 people to discuss Higgs mass calculations. It's supposed to be entirely focussed on the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM) and the Next-to-Minimal variant (NMSSM) but in recent times my collaborators and I have been trying to stretch the scope to talk about…
Well, here goes. I've wanted to start a blog for a long time and late January of a new year is as good a time as any to finally do it. What do I intend to write about? Why theoretical high energy physics is exciting. I've been increasingly upset by the negative effect that a few presumably well-meaning bloggers have had on the HEP community, and want to help show that we're not all suffering from…